Thursday, June 20, 2013

July 4, 1862---The Union Forever (!) (?)



JULY 4, 1862:    

On Independence Day, 1862, the editor of The New York Times foresaw a bright future for the country:

The National Natal Day

Through the thick gloom of the present I see the brightness of the future as the sun in heaven. We shall make this a glorious and immortal day. When we are in our graves our children will honor it. They will celebrate it with thanksgiving, with festivities, with bonfires, with illuminations. On its annual return they will shed tears, not of subjection and Slavery, not of agony and distress, but of exultation, of gratitude and of joy.’

Thus exclaimed the patriot seer, JOHN ADAMS, on the adoption of the Declaration, July 4, eighty-six years ago. We could have no better motto for to-day. He saluted it, by the ‘All hail hereafter!’ as the birthday of the Republic. We celebrate it now in the new birth and regeneration of that Republic. Now, as then, indeed, ‘thick gloom’ hangs over our country, but the eye of faith can descry the ‘brightness of the future as the sun in heaven.’ To-day, we celebrate it not merely by the ‘festivities, bonfires and illuminations’ whereof he speaks, but by the awful baptism of fire and blood. We have, indeed, our wonted festivities; but the real celebration to-day is along the line of battle, and where the Union hosts surround the beleaguered armies of the cursed rebellion. There are our hearts and hopes. The rest is all but show. And we ‘have that within that passeth show.’ God defend and prosper the armies of the Republic!”



The Richmond Daily Dispatch mocked the Union’s premature expectations of victory, and wondered aloud why they bothered celebrating Independence Day anyway, “having sacrificed all the principles which it was designed to commemorate.”

“The Fourth of July.

The Yankee Congress, a week or two ago, objected to adjourning, because McClellan would probably be in Richmond by the Fourth of July, and they wished to be in readiness to enact any legislation which that event might require. They are a grand people for dramatic effects. On the last Fourth of July there was to have been, according to the orders of that magnificent ass, Abraham Lincoln, and a flaming programme in the New York Herald, a general, combined, simultaneous march of the universal Yankee columns, East and West, upon the strongholds of the Southern Rebellion, which were to be chewed up and exterminated without farther delay. But the North was not able to celebrate its Fourth of July in this manner, and the South put off its celebration till the Twenty-first! It will hardly be able to celebrate its next Fourth in Richmond. What it wants to celebrate it for at all, having sacrificed all the principles which it was designed to commemorate, is beyond our comprehension.”

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